Page 100 of Just One Little Bargain

I want so badly to keep this, but I shut the thought down before it can become a future in my head.

She’s mortal. She’s got a mortgage and a whole life rooted in this town. In fifteen days, the earth will open and Hell will take me back down into a place she can never see. That’s not a rule I can argue with. This is simply where I’m from and where I have to go. The bond doesn’t change that.

If I tell her what we are and then vanish forever, all I’ve given her is grief with my name carved into it, waiting for the moment I’m gone.

Evie wouldn’t feel it the way I do. She couldn’t. She might not believe in soulmates at all. Worse, she might believe me and still not want what I want. Still not want me. I don’t know which would hurt more.

But I’ve got whatever’s left of these two weeks. I’m going to treat every hour as a gift. I’ll be what she needs for as long as she lets me.

That should make the ending easier to accept, but it only makes me dread it more.

And beneath all the decent things I’ve just talked myself into, my body couldn’t care less about any of it and still wants her. Her scent is everywhere in the cottage: vanilla in the cushions, cinnamon in the blanket, and the faint trace of brown sugar that follows her from room to room because this woman bakes so often it has permanently colonized every soft surface in her home.

Every breath brings another trace of her with it.

I shouldn’t do what I’m about to do. I’ve got principles. Admittedly untested ones with no actual track record under pressure, but they exist in theory. I mean to honor them, but then my fingers slide under the waistband of the flannel pants, wrapping around my cock.

The first touch hits so hard my hips buck off the sofa, and I clamp my forearm over my mouth, breathing hot and ragged against my skin. It doesn’t help. A moan still tears out of me as my fist slides slowly up the full length of my cock, until my thighs tense and my head tips back into the cushions.

Just to take the edge off so I can sleep.

That’s the lie I tell myself while my thumb circles the wet, sensitive head and my hips roll up, shamelessly chasing my hand. This isn’t her and never could be, but it’s the only version I’m ever going to get. I hate that I’d rather have the counterfeit than nothing at all.

I attempt to keep the fantasy impersonal: a blank shape, an anonymous scenario, functional and forgettable. My brain entertains that for approximately five seconds, then replaces it entirely with Evie.

I stop fighting it, though what comes next isn’t the tender version of this I’d like to think I’m capable of.

It’s Evie against the kitchen counter, with her dress shoved to her waist, one thigh hitched around me, my hand under all that pretty fabric. My fist moves slowly as I imagine my fingers sliding through the slick heat of her, my thumb finding her clit and staying there until her breath breaks.

I have to stop and drag my glasses off. They’ve fogged at the edges and slid halfway down my nose. It’s such a ridiculous, human problem to be having mid-stroke that I nearly laugh, but the sound turns into a groan.

Apparently, I don’t feel things by halves. I spent thirty years carefully not wanting anything I couldn’t have, so I never had reason to find out. Then I got dropped into Evie’s life, close enough to learn how she moves, the turns of her mind, and the exact pitch her voice takes when I’ve annoyed her. She’s become the person I reach for without deciding to, and I’ve made no effort to stop.

Wanting her is only part of the problem. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I know how pathetic that sounds. She actually asks me questions. What I like, what I think, whether I’ve tasted whatever she’s got going in the oven. She’s never once mocked me for reading every magazine she abandons around the inn. And lately she’s been baking at a volume no reasonable occupancy could justify, calling it keeping her hands occupied—a cover story neither of us believes and she hasn’t yet admitted is for me.

No one has ever gone to that kind of ordinary trouble for me. Evie does all of it without making a production of anything, and I’ve started living for it.

My fist picks up speed, the flannel trousers shoved past my hips and the quilt bunched at my waist. Cool air against my bare skin does absolutely nothing to slow me down. The slick, rhythmic sound seems obscenely loud in the dark cottage.

I’m close, and the ache is worse than it should be because even here I know exactly what’s missing: her actual weight against me. My free hand grips the arm of the couch so hard my fingers start to ache, and when I come, it spills in thick, pulsing streaks across my fist and stomach, my teeth sunk into my forearm to keep myself quiet.

I lie there shaking, sweat cooling on my skin and a full set of tooth marks printed into my arm, until the pleasure ebbs and grief returns, followed almost immediately by shame.

I turned a woman who trusts me into a fantasy so explicit it would make a succubus blush, and every detail I’ve cataloged went into it: her sounds, her skin, the way she reacts when I stand too close. I noticed all of it without meaning to, then used every bit of it anyway.

The front door clicks open while I’m still there, sticky and bare from navel to thigh.

I fumble for the quilt at my feet and yank it up, too panicked to stop it dragging through the mess on my skin. The stain transfers onto the quilt Evie tucks around herself every night while she reads, and I hate myself a little more. But I keep pulling because the alternative is worse.

Keys land in the ceramic bowl. Shoes come off, one thud then another.

I shut my eyes and force my breathing to slow, which is a spectacular ask given that my heart rate could currently power a small generator.

“Milo?”

I say nothing.

I’m asleep.